D. J. MacHale
The Reality Bug
Bobby Pendragon slipped the heavy ring onto his finger, where it belonged. But no sooner was it back in place when surprisingly, it began to twitch.
“What’s the matter?” Mark Dimond asked.
“It… it’s activating,” Bobby said with surprise.
“Really? You mean there’s a gate around here?” Courtney Chetwynde asked.
The gray stone in the center of the ring began to glow, then sparkle. A second later a sharp beam of light shot from its center. With a flash, the light blossomed into an image that hovered in front of the group.
Mark and Courtney took a surprised step backward. Gunny Van Dyke stepped protectively in front of them. But Bobby held his ground. Of the four of them standing on the empty lot at 2 Linden Place, Second Earth, Bobby was the only one who had seen this particular phenomenon before.
Floating before them was the image of a girl. Actually, it was a girl’s head. Just a head. It was bigger than life, but definitely a girl. She had blond hair pulled back in a ponytail and wore small, yellow-tinted glasses.
“Whoa,” said Courtney in awe.
“Yeah, whoa” added Mark.
“Aja Killian,” whispered Bobby.
“Who?” Gunny asked.
“The Traveler from Veelox.”
“Where have you been?” the floating head demanded angrily. “I’ve been trying to contact you for ages!” “Long story” Bobby answered.
“I don’t want to hear it, Pendragon,” Aja’s head shot back. “You’d better get back to Veelox.” “Why?” Bobby asked.
Aja-head hesitated. She looked nervous. Or at least as nervous as a 3-D floating head could look. “I’m not saying I made a mistake,” she explained with a touch of embarrassment. “This may be a total false alarm, but-“
“Just say it!” Bobby shouted.
“All right!” Aja snapped. “Saint Dane may have slipped through my security system. He is here on Veelox.”
Bobby smiled and asked teasingly, “You’re telling me your perfect security system isn’t all that perfect?”
“Are you coming or not?” Aja demanded. She didn’t like being challenged.
“On my way,” Bobby answered.
“Don’t take your time,” Aja said snottily. Then the image vanished. The beam of light shot back into the ring and all was normal.
“Well,” said Courtney with a sigh. “That was… strange.”
“I guess I’m going to Veelox,” Bobby said. Then looked to Gunny and asked, “Want to come?”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Gunny answered with a smile.
Bobby turned to face Mark and Courtney. “This has been the best week of my life,” he said sincerely.
The three friends had just spent an excellent week together, forgetting for a short while that Bobby Pendragon was a Traveler who shot across the universe, protecting Halla from an evil demon. Mark was nearly in tears. Courtney wasn’t far behind. She walked up to Bobby and before he realized what was happening, she grabbed him and planted a serious kiss on his lips. Bobby didn’t fight it. Once the shock was over, he wrapped his arms around Courtney and held her close.
Mark and Gunny turned away.
“So?” Gunny asked Mark. “How ‘bout them Yankees?”
When Courtney and Bobby finally unlocked lips, Bobby’s eyes were a little watery. But Courtney’s gaze was razor sharp.
“Let’s not wait another year before the next one, okay?” she said.
“Uh… sure. Sounds good,” Bobby replied, trying to keep his knees from buckling.
Mark looked at Bobby, his best friend, and said, “Remember what we talked about, okay?”
“I promise,” Bobby answered sincerely.
Bobby and Gunny walked toward the street and the limousine that was waiting to take them to the Bronx, and the flume.
“How are you feeling, shorty?” Gunny asked. “I mean… where is your head you know, with things?”
“I feel like Saint Dane got the better of me on First Earth,” he answered thoughtfully. He then locked eyes with Gunny and said with total confidence, “And I’m not gonna let it happen again.”
Gunny chuckled.
“What’s so funny?” Bobby asked.
“Shorty, you’re starting to sound just like your uncle Press.” Bobby smiled. He liked that. The two got into the back of the big car, the driver gunned the engine, and they were on their way.
Mark and Courtney watched as the black limo picked up speed with Bobby’s hand still out the window, waving good-bye.
“What was it you guys talked about?” Courtney asked Mark.
“All sorts of things,” he said with a sly smile. “But I’ll tell you one thing: I’ll bet we’re going to see Bobby Pendragon again, a lot sooner than you think.”
They took a last look at the departing limousine and saw Bobby pull his arm back inside. The car turned onto the main road and disappeared.
Mark Dimond was ready for an adventure.
He had spent the first fifteen years of his life on the sidelines, watching everybody else have all the fun. It was getting old. He was tired of being wallpaper, tired of being the brunt of geek jokes, and really tired of wishing he was somebody else. Anybody else. But even Mark had to admit that it was going to be tough pulling himself out of the deep hole of dorkdom he had been digging since birth.
When he was a baby, his parents barely let him out of the house because he was allergic to everything but air. In three years of Little League he got on base only once, because he was hit by a pitch that broke his glasses. Girls scared him, but that wasn’t much of a problem because most girls never looked at him twice anyway. They weren’t interested in a guy who constantly gnawed on carrots (to improve his vision), sat in the first row of class (because he had every correct answer, always), and had a stringy mop of hair that always looked like it should have been washed yesterday.
No, Mark hadn’t exactly been living large. But now that he was fifteen, he was determined to make a change. He was ready to seize the day and kick start a new life filled with adventure and excitement. Why?
Because he had a best buddy named Bobby Pendragon.
They had been friends since kindergarten, though most people thought they were as different as east and west. Bobby was athletic and funny and people loved to be around him. Mark was quiet and tripped a lot. But that was just surface stuff.
Mark and Bobby liked the same things, and not always the normal things that other kids thought were cool. They loved old Abbott and Costello movies, ‘80s music, Thai food, and James Bond novels (not the movies, the original novels). They laughed at the same jokes. They started a band, but Bobby could barely play the guitar and Mark only had an ancient set of bongos. Neither could sing. They were terrible. They had a blast.
They liked to fish in the small river that wound its way through their little town of Stony Brook, Connecticut. It didn’t matter that they hardly ever caught anything. It was all about getting away for hours to just hang. Like most guys, they talked about girls and sports, and about what teachers they wanted vaporized. But they also talked about ideas, about traveling and seeing different places, and about the future.
Each always seemed to know when the other needed encouragement, or a kick in the butt. For Bobby, Mark was the only guy he knew who thought outside the box. For Mark, Bobby was his lifeline to the rest of the world. Both knew that no matter what twists their lives took, they would always be best friends.
What they hadn’t known was that during the winter of their fifteenth year, Bobby and his entire family would mysteriously disappear. A huge investigation by the local police turned up nothing. Literally. It was like the Pendragons had been magically erased from existence.
But Mark knew the truth.
He wasn’t sure what had happened to the rest of the Pendragon family, but he knew where Bobby had gone. He had left with his uncle, Press, to become a Traveler. Bobby Pendragon and his uncle had flown through a portal called a flume that took them to strange, distant territories where they joined with other Travelers to do battle against a demon named Saint Dane. In the year and a half since Bobby had left home, he helped prevent a medieval territory called Denduron from blowing itself up, halted the spread of a poison that would have wiped out the entire population of a water territory called Cloral, and traveled back in time to stop Nazi Germany from developing the world’s first atomic bomb.